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July 31, 2006

July '06: Hot Just Like An Oven

Meant to throw these up at the start of the month, but my plate has been really full with all sorts of other activities.

1. Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland and Rick Ross - "Promiscuous" remix

After somehow enduring a screening of the miserable Hurlyburly back in 1999, I became really intrigued by the idea that a really terrible movie could have great acting in it (or maybe just great actors/actresses, I don't really remember). I immediately tried to think of an example of the converse - that is, a great movie that featured terrible acting (and by great movie I mean genuinely great, not just so-bad-it's-good). The first thing that came to my mind was Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, though given the experimental low-budget nature of that film, I'm not sure that it should qualify. Anyway, I'm sure some cinema freaks out there could come up with a far more appropriate example, but all of this is just a long-winded way of getting at my sincere belief that "Promiscuous" is a pretty awesome song, almost in spite of the fact that the lyrics are kinda awful, Furtado's speak-rapping is awkward at best, and no one really needed to hear Timbaland sing those high notes. Luckily, Timbo's ridiculously mesmerizing beat totally makes this ridiculous song work. And getting rapper-of-the-moment Rick Ross to drop 16 bars at the start of the remix just makes the whole thing even better. This is clearly the "Hollaback Girl" of 2006, even following the exact same formula (multiplatinum pop chanteuse collabs with hip-hop superproducer and comes up with the strangest-sounding song on Top 40 radio). A jam of the summer, to be sure.


2. Girl Talk - Night Ripper

OK, so this is actually a 42-minute "mix" of sorts and it's about as far from a single discrete track/song as one can possibly get. But this Girl Talk CD is so incredibly entertaining and awesome that I had no problem just letting the whole thing ride during the pre-dancing warmup stage of the June 10th Inferno. Critics with short musical memories may simply try to analyze this record by placing it in the recent context of mash-ups and Hollertronix blah blah, but you could just as easily imagine Night Ripper as a John Oswald-type/plunderphonics album where the average sample size got increased to about 16 bars, half of the samples were chosen from the last year of hip-hop radio, and the whole shebang was executed with both the crowd-pleasing skills of an amazing party DJ and the laser-like precision and software skills of an expert dance music producer. This has been my main jogging soundtrack over these last few months. Purchase Night Ripper direct from Illegal Art (via Paypal) and get free access to a single-track MP3 version of the album. Or download a brief excerpt of Night Ripper here:

Girl Talk - "Bounce That" (3:23, 7.3 MB)

(I won't play identify-that-sample with this track except to point out that "Bounce That" contains portions of Elastica's "Connection", recently an answer to a 506 music trivia tiebreaker that I answered before the question was even finished....only to have the resulting Fuss Frucks victory unfairly overruled minutes later due to some administrative failures and overly anal re-scoring procedures. But we'll bounce back, believe that.)

3. Hot Chip - "And I Was A Boy From School"

Hot Chip's The Warning is one of my favourite albums of 2006 thus far (right up there with J Dilla's Donuts, the aforementioned Girl Talk, The Coup's Pick A Bigger Weapon, and the new TV on the Radio record). Cannonballz lent me a vinyl EP with "Over and Over" on it late last year and I dug the totally distorted joy-of-repetition groove infinitely more than the mellower Hot Chip material that had been released domestically by that point. When I first heard this full-length, I was struck by the awesome title cut and it's pillow-soft chorus full of unlikely threats to "break your legs", "snap off your head", and "put you down under the ground". But the real dancefloor heater on here is "And I Was A Boy From School". Really bouncy beat, underwater sonar synths, and occasional handclaps! Hot Chip will wear out your legs...help you break it down...

4. Pharrell - "Angel"

People are panning the new Pharrell album right and left. And rightfully so, I'd have to agree that In My Mind kinda blows. But before we collectively bury Lil' Skateboard P and all those words/thoughts that he should've kept in his mind, I feel the need to heap some actual praise onto the feel-good love-jam "Angel", one of the most sickly-sweet songs that I've loved in a long-ass time. The song's thumping piano-based beat is basically a much-improved version of "Change Clothes", and yet something about this song actually reminds me of old-school N*E*R*D beats and funnier pre-BBC Pharrell. "Angel" had me at the ludicrous loaf-of-bread metaphor, but those pre-chorus "muh-fuckers" and the bizarre door-ringing enactment during the bridge just put the whole thing over the top. This song was actually something of an under-promoted second single/import/video that followed up "Can I Have It Like That" many months ago, but I guess people were too busy waiting for the Clipse album to even notice.

5. Tha Dogg Pound - "Cali Iz Active"

Pardon me for possibly over-liking that Busta Rhymes song as a result of my recent travels. I now realize that this DPG joint might be the real retro-sounding regional anthem of summer 2006. For starters, Kurupt/Daz/Snoop spit out several verses of actual quality rapping instead of an annoying shout-out/roll-call that goes on for more than two minutes. And while I have yet to hear anyone put their local stamp on that nice "New York Sh*t" beat, I recently heard a late-night WKNC DJ drop in some hot "Raleigh Iz Active" and "Durham Iz Active" voiceovers while playing Tha Dogg Pound. Unfortunately, San Francisco's DJ Short Round didn't play this joint at Disco Inferno a few weeks ago, even though Cali was most definitely active what with all those new Bay joints Short Round was spinning!

I know most of these are several months old by this point, but oh well, summertime rolls. I'm planning on having some fresher picks for August...

Posted by Tim at July 31, 2006 11:42 PM

Comments

Posted by: Ruby at August 13, 2006 05:26 PM

Posted by: pinky at August 25, 2006 01:06 PM

Posted by: Tim R at August 25, 2006 11:33 PM

Posted by: Tim R at September 7, 2006 02:13 PM

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